Is there “a philo­soph­i­cal incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty between reli­gion and sci­ence. Does the empir­i­cal nature of sci­ence con­tra­dict the rev­e­la­to­ry nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two insti­tu­tions must be con­sid­ered essen­tial­ly antag­o­nis­tic?” These were the ques­tions raised by Jer­ry Coyne, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, in a long and meaty book review (“See­ing and Believ­ing”) appear­ing in The New Repub­lic. Over at the Edge.org, a num­ber of sci­en­tif­ic thinkers, who reg­u­lar­ly engage with these essen­tial ques­tions, have offered their own thoughts on the mat­ter. You’ll find short pieces by Stephen Pinker, Daniel Den­nett, Sam Har­ris, George Dyson and oth­ers. This one pas­sage by Karl Giber­son par­tic­u­lar­ly struck me (though it’s not exact­ly a reflec­tion of my world­view):

Empir­i­cal sci­ence does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Dar­win showed only too clear­ly. But empir­i­cal sci­ence also trumps oth­er empir­i­cal sci­ence. Ein­stein’s dethrone­ment of New­ton was not the whole­sale under­min­ing of the sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise, even though it showed that sci­ence was clear­ly in error. It was, rather, a glo­ri­ous and appro­pri­ate­ly cel­e­brat­ed advance for sci­ence, albeit one not under­stood by most peo­ple. Why is this dif­fer­ent than mod­ern the­ol­o­gy’s near uni­ver­sal rejec­tion of the tyran­ni­cal anthro­po­mor­phic deity of the Old Tes­ta­ment, so elo­quent­ly skew­ered by Dawkins? How is it that “sci­ence” is allowed to toss its his­tor­i­cal bag­gage over­board when its best informed lead­ers decide to do so, even though the ideas con­tin­ue to cir­cu­late on main street, but reli­gion must for­ev­er be defined by the ancient bag­gage car­ried by its least informed?

The world dis­closed by sci­ence is rich and mar­velous, but most peo­ple think there is more to it. Our reli­gious tra­di­tions embody our fit­ful and imper­fect reflec­tions on this mys­te­ri­ous and tran­scen­dent intuition—an intu­ition that, as artic­u­lat­ed by some of our most pro­found thinkers, seeks an under­stand­ing of the world that is goes beyond the empir­i­cal.